Hi Abdullah,
I thought I'd pass on something that came up on TEI-L regarding a similarish problem. The goal there is to mark up classical texts to allow
the comparision of the interrelated artefacts at te levels of words, phrases, clauses and text hierarchical structures, so that it is possible e.g. to sort and analyse all corresponding phrase and clause patterns in two texts in different languages.
The specific problem this person is looking at solving involves dealing with multiple hierarchies in this analysis, but he discussed databases that allow handling annotated text, which seems quite close to what you are doing.
He cited an open source database program he was planning to use that is designed for this type of work: http://emdros.org/index.html
Don't know if it is for you, but it is an idea.
-dan
On Mon, 2006-06-11 at 00:23 +0000, Abdullah Alger wrote:
I also thought about XML, because of its flexibility, but if I decided to use XML then wouldn't I have to write all the code for it? It would take a lot of time, unless there was a way that I could do it through excel.
Quoting Daniel O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca:
On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 09:36 +0000, Abdullah Alger wrote:
To tell you the truth, what I am doing is calculating the number of formulaic patterns and the number of punctuation marks in the Exeter Book. It is quite simple to look at all the information in Excel, but I cannot really compare results from the formulaic patterns with the punctuation practises, since the data is quite large and multidimensional. I think that Minitab would work well from what I have been told, but I have no experience with this tool.
I don't know minitab, but I'm wondering if XML and XQuery might be a useful way of getting at this data--of course I don't know exactly where you are with it or what you are doing. There would be issues with multiple hierarchies, but they wouldn't be unsolvable. In my new function, of course, I'd strongly recommend TEI for it as well ;)
-dan
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Chair, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Canada Vox: +1 403 329-2378 Fax: +1 403 382-7191
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